A Brief History of Invisible Art brings together artworks from six decades that place a pronounced emphasis on the conceptual and communicative possibilities of the work of art, while bypassing its seeming requirements of visibility and materiality. In surveying this terrain, the exhibition includes works that represent a wide range of aesthetic practices and that engage with surprisingly diverse concerns. Whether underscoring the role of the audience, mocking the theological aura of museum rhetoric or calling attention to the importance of linguistic description in cultural production, these works prompt us to see through the more grandiose distractions of contemporary art and so to think more clearly about its underlying functions.

Capp Street Project: Jeanne Dunning (November 30, 2005–February 21, 2006)
Capp Street Project artist in residence Jeanne Dunning presents new work elaborating on her continuing investigation of equivocal photographic representations that evoke disturbing, often corporeal associations. Centering around a series of large-scale photographs depicting a red color-field—the aftermath of an eleven-person action inspired by the La Tomatina festival in Spain—Dunning’s installation explores the boundaries between the sublime and the grotesque, while probing the viewer’s instinctive visceral reaction.

Artur Zmijewski: Repetition (November 30, 2005–February 21, 2006)
Artur Zmijewski’s film Repetition (2005) is a complex and riveting documentary of his restaging of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. In place of college students, Zmijewski hired unemployed Polish men to enact the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison environment. Filmed with hidden cameras, their behavior quickly progresses from play-acting to acts of seemingly genuine frustration and anger. Confrontations between prisoners and guards escalate ominously. Just when it seems that Zmijewski’s experiment will replicate the traumatic results of the original, things take an unexpected turn, in a manner that raises questions about the differences between art and science, and whether either can offer convincing conclusions about human nature.

SPECIAL EVENT
Artur Zmijewski and Professor Philip Zimbardo (originator of the Stanford Prison Experiment) in conversation
November 30, 6–7:30 p.m.

For further information on the CCA Wattis Institute please visit http://www.wattis.org.